Alejandro Mestre, new Jesuit denounced for abuses in Bolivia and first Spanish archbishop accused of pedophilia

EL PAÍS launched in 2018 an investigation of pedophilia in the Spanish Church and has an updated database with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to: abusos@elpais.es. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.

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The scandal of pedophilia in the Bolivian Church reaches the high positions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Spanish archbishop Alejandro Mestre, who died in 1988 and who was archbishop of La Paz, has been denounced by the Society of Jesus before the Prosecutor's Office of the Latin American country for sexual abuse of minors in 1961, when he was a teacher at the school of San Calixto de La Paz, in Bolivia, where he developed his career. The Public Ministry reported Wednesday that it has already created a commission of prosecutors to investigate this case. The lawyer of the Jesuits, Audalia Zurita, explained that that same afternoon the prosecution carried out two searches "in search of information and documentation that is in the possession of the curia" about the Jesuit priests who have recently been accused of sexual abuse, among which is Mestre. He is the sixth member of the order accused in recent days in Bolivia, after EL PAÍS revealed the case of Alfonso Pedrajas, the Spanish Jesuit who kept a diary of dozens of abuses in this country for decades.

Mestre, born in the Valencian town of Quart de Poblet in 1912, is the first Spaniard to hold the position of bishop who is accused of a crime of pedophilia. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1928 and was ordained in 1943. Sources of the order in Spain report that there are no complaints of abuses against him in Spain and do not have the date on which he was sent to Bolivia, where he spent his entire career. He wasappointed auxiliary bishop of Sucre in 1976 and promoted to coadjutor archbishop of La Paz in 1982. His career took him to the position of secretary general of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference in the early eighties, one of the most influential positions of the Church in the Latin American country.

Headquarters of the offices of the Society of Jesus in La Paz, Bolivia, during the police search ordered by the Prosecutor's Office, following complaints against Jesuits for abuse of minors. Daniel J. Miranda / APGNews

The complaint against Mestre reached the offices of the Prosecutor's Office a week after EL PAÍS uncovered the case of Pedrajas, which revealed abuses of dozens of minors in schools of the order in the South American country and also revealed how his superiors covered it up for decades. The publication has unleashed a political and media earthquake in recent weeks: the Jesuits have removed eight former provincials for possible cover-up, the attorney general's office has opened an investigation and Bolivian President Luis Arce has registered a draft law to make imprescriptible the crimes of pedophilia. All this has led to new cases coming to light. One of them has been that of Mestre, which the Society of Jesus itself made public a few days ago, but of which it already had knowledge since December 2021, as reported by the order this Thursday at nine o'clock at night (Bolivian time) to EL PAÍS.

The Jesuits then opened a canonical investigation, gathered information on the facts and, finally, closed the process when the accused was dead. "The Society of Jesus instructed that the complainant be attended to with specialized accompaniment. To date, the complainant has not communicated to specify such accompaniment, "explains the Company to this newspaper. The Jesuits have included the documentation of these canonical investigations in their complaint to the Public Ministry.

Although the Bolivian Episcopal Conference apologized three days after the publication of the EL PAÍS report on the Pedrajas case, it has not wanted to make an assessment of Mestre's complaint. The Jesuits claim that they communicated this case to the Bolivian bishops in February of this year. During his tenure as secretary general, the now accused played an important role as a political intermediary against the dictatorship of Luis García Meza, which lasted from 1980 to 1981. Mestre, among other things, worked to have the bodies of the executed leaders of the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) returned to their families for a Christian burial.

Along with Mestre's complaint, the Jesuits of Bolivia filed another againstLuis María Roma Padrosa, who was already accused in 2019 shortly before he died, but the order did not then take this case to justice. Lucho Roma, as he was known in Bolivia, was denounced internally by another former member of the Society. This former religious discovered by chance in 2007 a CD owned by Rome with numerous photographs of naked minors, in sexual scenes and in which even the Jesuit himself appeared.

Like Roma and Mestre, most of the accused religious who have come out in the wake of the Pedrajas case are Spanish Jesuits sent as missionaries to Bolivia. Some like Pedrajas, Mestre, Roma or Antonio Gausset – a Jesuit who died and accused of abusing indigenous children in the nineties in Sucre – developed their entire career in the Latin American country. But others, such as Luis Tó or Francesc Peris, were teachers in Jesuit schools in Spain and were sent to Bolivia after being accused – convicted by a court in the case of Tó – of abusing minors. Peris, for example, only spent one year (1982-1983) in a school in Cochabamba where he is accused of abusing girls and then returned to the Jesuit center of Caspe, Barcelona. Recently, as EL PAÍS has published, several victims accuse him of touching in the nineties and the order in Spain has confessed that he was removed in 2005 from contact with minors for "inappropriate behavior".

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